In China, real people vs. Internet minders

In the next three months, users of China's microblog weibo.com --- "weibo" is the generic Chinese
term for Twitter-like platforms --- run by the huge sina.com (the English site is here) news
portal, entertainment and blogging site, will have to start providing their
real-world identities to the site, instead of simply being able to register. It
seems likely the users of competitor tencent.com (English here) will have to do
the same, though the government
hasn't made that clear in recent announcements, dating back to December 16.

China's initiative appears similar to South
Korea requiring Internet users to provide ID numbers on Internet forums in
2004, which was expanded to cover all websites with 100,000 visitors per day in
2007. The South Korean policy has been frequently criticized and often evaded,
and has led to collateral damage, such as hackers stealing a reported 35
million ID numbers in a break in.
Google's YouTube refused to be part of the requirement (instead
forbidding uploads from accounts whose country was set to South Korea), and the
United Nations special rapporteur on free expression, Frank La Rue, has
recommended it be abolished. The current Ministry of Public Administration has
advised that the policy be abandoned.

Given the vast number of people online and the wide
popularity of the microblogs, China's tightening comes as no surprise: In
October the government announced that stricter guidelines for social media
sites were on the way. In November, as Sky
Canaves reported from Hong Kong, authorities convened an unusual seminar in
Beijing for senior executives of 39 major enterprises involved in Internet
services, technology and telecommunications. Even though the official news
agency Xinhua
reported on the proceedings, it wasn't clear what decisions had come out of
the meeting. But as Canaves pointed out, "It's likely that private Internet
companies will take whatever measures are necessary to ensure their survival by
helping to ensure the survival of the Communist Party."

And it's no surprise that the official People's Daily supported the move --- its Monday editorial, "Weibo regulations a
step on the right path," acknowledges the good and what it considers the
bad of the situation:

Anonymity empowered weibo with the strength of public
supervision, and the power could be overwhelming, especially for sensitive
events. It's the mainstream nature of weibo which has propelled social change.
However, anonymity also resulted in widespread irresponsible remarks, and
served as soil and air for rumors and encouraged fake online personas who
manipulated Web opinions.

With more than more than 457
million users online, many of China's Internet operations are huge and
highly profitable. While high-speed access is widely available, the majority of
China's Internet users aren't on fast broadband, they're on mobile devices. Either
way, the companies supplying the services are popular and profitable. Sites
like the search engine and web portal Baidu.com
match the revenues if not the capitalization of U.S. companies like Google.

And despite all the talk about the Great Firewall of China,
the official policy has been to encourage the spread of the Internet --- the
government fully appreciates the economic value of a fully wired country.
Monitoring the enormous flow of content has largely been handed over to the
companies providing the services, with the implicit threat that if things get
too far out of hand, the corporations will be held responsible and punished.
With a greater concern for revenue than rights, most companies know they must
comply with the government's demands.

It is a mistake to underestimate the power of the Internet
in China. Look into the story
of protests in Wukan in south China's Guangdong province. Villagers have
been demonstrating against the highhanded seizure of farmland by village
leaders and the suspicious death of a protest organizer who had been arrested
by local police. Pictures of rallies regularly pop on weibo.com and the village
has become a focus for populist support. Internet
access has been restricted, reporters have been ordered to leave, but cell
phone pictures and video which make it to the Internet are keeping the outside
world informed of what has been going on. After a week of protests, on
Tuesday the government backed down and apparently offered concessions on
the land grabs and the official's death. As CPJ's Senior Asia Researcher Madeline
Earp has reported, grassroots reporting increasingly drives the agenda of
traditional print and broadcast media in China.

With such dynamism and the economic importance of the
Internet in China, it's not just the December 16 announcements about real name
registration that are so important, though they are undoubtedly intended to
have a damping effect. We can expect more steps to come out of that November
meeting in Beijing as the government races to stay ahead of what will soon be
more than half a billion people online in China.

Bob Dietz, coordinator of CPJ’s Asia Program, has reported across the continent for news outlets such as CNN and Asiaweek. He has led numerous CPJ missions, including ones to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Follow him on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.